


The Good Hunter

by kirkhammer



Category: Bloodborne (Video Game)
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-12
Updated: 2019-11-12
Packaged: 2021-01-29 16:20:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 908
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21413074
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kirkhammer/pseuds/kirkhammer
Summary: Bloodborne is a State of Mind.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 15





	The Good Hunter

He sees it in the distance, the shape of the City shattering the horizon like a vast, cracked spine.

Towering monoliths veiled by smoke. By filth. The soft haze of dirt and decay. This far out from the city the earth still clings to its life. Sickly patches of green, their edges frayed and flattened to thick, dark, gleaming clay. Birds sing here, though not as many as should. Even the caged ones are quiet, bright colours dulled and ragged, like an ornament left in the sun. They hide in their canopy of deep greens, richly locked away, barred with tight black iron.

He knows that feeling; trapped, needled, though the black iron that cages him spirals cruelly into the heavens, piercing the heavy belly of the night. He finds comfort in those, twisted shadows, even if it is cold. Now the streets are lined with chained boxes and even beneath this bitter winter chill, the air is clotted, feverish, with the creeping reek of rot. Perhaps he hates Yharnam, more than he loves it. Perhaps he doesn't love it at all, though he avoids confronting this feeling, aptly, like the plague. The City had become an island in the tide of cemeteries. What is it that they say, about Familiarity and Contempt? Yharnam had changed its shape into something he neither knew nor recognized, though he could trace its streets within the lines and folds of his mortal mind; and still, he and the city had taken it within their strides. His breath fogged, and in their barred houses the people laughed, and the Cathedral sang its heavy brass knell every hour, as if it was any other night. Any other night. 

This may not have been his home, but it was his Place of Belonging. If the City finally balked at the bitter pill its denizens so eagerly took him for, they would find a patch of bare bright ground in the settling dust that was Perfectly his shape. An old, proud and polished gun absent after years from its spot on the wall. He wonders, how long it has been since he forgot how to belong anywhere else? 

He has forgotten what he came here for. Too many names on too many stones. Too many years, and dead friends. More now, filling the streets rather than these shallow pits. Piled up, softening sweetly. Mother Nature's final triumph, spitting our bodies out of the earth that brewed us. Assuming, of course, that the wise men here didn't haul her body onto the marble years ago and search for its secrets with silver knives. No more room. Not in hell. Not in here. They called the Gods down and they spoke with pale tongues. Were they ever our Gods to call? The city now, its mire, its misery, had it ever known Holy at all? 

He thinks he did, once. In his youth. Between walls of wood and fur that muffled the night. Breath that clouded so densely he could paint his name as he spoke it. When the only slate he'd known was the tone of the sky and his own eyes. They had churches too, of course. Squat little things with castle walls to ward off the winter and the hunger, without and within. Their insides, too, lined with bone. The earth was dark and iron hard and he would wake each morning to a world of white. It was cold, the kind of cold that burned your fingers and your ears, but it had never been, bitter. The wind between these hunks of carved stone twisted sharply, cruelly. There was Warmth in the silence of snow. Muted, clean. Not a mark on it. The softest sculpting of the heavens. The earth remade with new, delicate hands. That too, he had forgotten. When he closed his eyes now and retreated to the pure tundra of his own old mind, that perfect quiet was pierced, bleeding, with the sharp, high keening of an unending and unstruck bell. 

Maddening. That the same taint that inked these streets to gleaming black and brilliant crimson had seeped even into his most hidden and heavy walled sanctuaries. The touch of a freshly stained brush to a clear crystal glass. He watches it weave its pattern through his mind, like lightning fraying over skin.

He will never be free of this place. If he dies here - no,  _ when,  _ for it is only a matter of time now. His eyes are dimmed and he is so, so tired. So tired he's sure he's never known tired before. The cold never really leaves him and his skin, his strength- they no longer feel his own. The fingers that spread on his shoulder are long as rope and the same shade as the sickly moon. When he looks to them, they are never there: but he feels them, sharp as hunger and strong as stone, pressing him firmly into the ground. He will not go now. He will not go easily. But when he  _ does _ , he knows, these streets will hold his body like stone. He will close his eyes for the final time and not a single soul will weep for him, or remember the sound of his name called through the snow. But, even amongst all that has been spilled for it, all that he has painted on its vast, rough tongue, he knows; Yharnam will remember the taste of his blood.

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! Bloodborne is extremely important to me. I wrote this while I was in a Place, and a Mood, and it is therefore, to some extent, fairly personal. I did consider editing it to be gender neutral so you could imagine your own hunter here! I decided against it because I felt it lost a little something. My Hunter's name is Mikhail: he is old, he is gentle, and he is very, very gay. As he is my legs and eyes within the world, my experience of the game is irrevocably tied to him. Anyway, I hope if you read this, that you enjoyed it, and that maybe we shared something for a moment!  
May the Good Blood guide your way.


End file.
